Category: Unificationism

My Neurons Made Me Do It: Neuroeducation at the Intersection of Religion and Science

brain

By Kathy Winings

(This is an excerpt from the full 2011 article published in the Journal of Unification Studies)

kathy-winings-2The cornerstone of the Divine Principle is its emphasis on the original ideal of God and the subsequent ontological understanding of men and women. The first chapter outlines the basic principle that guided the creation and interrelatedness of all life forms with God and provides a clear description of our ultimate purpose of life as God originally intended. An important component of that principle concerns the description of human beings as having a spiritual body and a physical body. Divine Principle further explains the process of growth and development for human beings as envisioned by God and describes how and in what way these two “bodies” interconnect.

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Movement, Church or Business?

Direction-road-maze

By John Redmond

IMG_9544There is an old movie called The Poseidon Adventure, where a passenger ship has an accident and capsizes.  The passengers are all freaked out and although there is trapped air to breathe for a while, everything is upside down and all the passengers have different ideas about the best way out though multiple, dark, inverted passageways. Groups of them argue and head off in different directions, most coming to a cold and lonely end.

Feel a shiver?

Our organization is heading off in many directions. Some want to build churches along the Christian “praise church” model, with home churches becoming traditional churches becoming megachurches.  Others produce banquet events, seeking to publicize aspects of Unification values.  Still others have gone to the business world seeking to make a foundation for a future time when the money will be spent well.

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The Economic System in Cheon Il Guk

world-economy

By Hideyuki Teshigawara

Teshigawara_edited-1As far as I know, there is no one who can explain the concrete system of Cheon Il Guk. But then is it possible to realize something without any clear vision and goal? Even if we have a clear vision and goal, it may be difficult to realize Cheon Il Guk.

Obviously, Cheon Il Guk is not the nation that can automatically be built by God’s miraculous power. The ideal of interdependence, mutual prosperity and universally shared values should be established through cooperation between God and human beings. It is wrong to think that the concrete plan for the society of Cheon Il Guk would be given by Rev. Moon or God unilaterally.

Regrettably, even inside the Unification Movement, a large number of people are reluctant to establish a concrete system for Cheon Il Guk. Their main insistence is that if the ideal world consists of “original” people (persons without fallen nature) and ideal families, the external structure will not be so important. However, it is a naive way of thinking that “original” people will do well whatever the system.

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Faith and Giving

Rev. Sun Myung Moon 

By Bruce Sutchar

bruce_sutcharJesus taught us that it is better to give than to receive.  It’s hard to really believe this until we ourselves have children.  Then we realize at Christmas that it is more joyful to watch our children opening their presents than to open our own.  But there is a deep connection between giving and faith.  It doesn’t work if we give gifts in hope or expectation that we will receive something in return.

In summer 2012, I was given the blessing of going to a seminar in Korea.  On the very first morning, Rev. Sun Myung Moon spoke for about nine hours.

Mrs. Moon tried several times to get him to stop.  She explained that many of the guests had just arrived the night before, that they had not gotten any sleep or that they had not eaten since their last meal on the plane.  Rev. Moon could not be dissuaded, not even when Mother Moon asked him to meet her at the boat dock (an obvious ploy).  He said that if Mother Moon wanted to see him, she should come back to the hall where he was speaking.

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“Leave It to Beaver” and a Family Perspective

Cleaver_family_Leave_it_to_Beaver_1960

by Jeff Kingsley

KIngsley copyMany of us fondly recall watching a TV show called Leave It to Beaver, that ran from 1957-63, and laughing at the antics of little “Beaver,” enjoying the give and take (and teasing) between him and elder brother Wally, while admiring the wisdom of his parents, June and Ward Cleaver. Little did we know that this show, in one sense, held the key to creating the ideal world.  Not that it was perfect or that it can “easily” be applied to the perhaps more complicated world in which we now find ourselves firmly embedded. But the main elements that comprise an ideal family were there, and as Reverend Moon often said, consonant with the great sages of the past, the true society is like an ideal family writ large.

This concept reminds me of a matryoshka doll I purchased when I was in Russia helping with the Divine Principle workshops being held in the Crimea in the early 90s. It consisted of a finely crafted set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside the other.

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The Feminine Spiritual Tsunami Headed Our Way

__Adrenaline___by_Surf_Snow_Street

By Tony Scazzero and Jeanne Carroll

Tony 1 W.I.M.G. thumbnail copy_edited-1Jeanne CarrollThe current patriarchal culture as seen in many societies has been perceived by some as the unseen cause of many problems in the world. Societies that have a strong masculine culture are suffering the effects of the imbalance of masculinity and femininity. Although there have been political, military and economic solutions aimed at the problem, has anyone declared that gender imbalance may be the cause as well as the solution to the current crisis?

The empowering of women is a revolutionary idea that has not gotten much traction in many cultures. Paradoxically, true brotherly love is absent when there are no mothers, aunts, daughters and sisters involved. Can a solution to today’s problems be traced back to a gender imbalance that has its cause in the misunderstanding of God’s original design for masculinity and femininity?

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The God that Failed: When Selfishness is Legislated as Law of the Land

AlanGreenspan

Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman from 1987-2006

By Wayne Hankins

HankinsHistory is written from the lives of good leaders with vision and principle, or bad leaders who led their people and countries to ruin and suffering because of their peculiar values, beliefs or ideas they felt were right and true. However, in following their ideal, something far different than they could have ever imagined or wanted came to be. When simply bad or false beliefs are carried to their logical ending, bad things follow. I will discuss the relationship between the ideology of Objectivism as defined by its creator, Ayn Rand, and the economic crash of 2008. I look closely at the steward of America’s monetary and regulatory policies, the Federal Reserve (the “Fed”). To correctly comprehend the workings of the Fed during the last two decades in large measure is to understand the beliefs of its past chairman (1987-2006), Alan Greenspan.

At 18, Greenspan first read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and was immediately hooked on her views of individual rights and their broader expression economically within laissez-faire capitalism. He saw this also as a moral argument against totalitarian communism.

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“You’re Not Really an Adult Until Your Father Dies”: Reaching the Highest Stage of Filial Piety

By John Redmond

IMG_9544In the current era of the development of our Unification movement, and the primacy of central blessed families, filial piety is an important measure of our behavior and an undeveloped aspect of the Divine Principle.  So what is it and how does it work?

According to Taoism.net:

“Filial piety consists of several factors; the main ideas include loving one’s parents, being respectful, polite, considerate, loyal, helpful, dutiful, and obedient.”

In our American experience, this narrow definition seems like an old-fashioned way of thinking about one’s responsibilities. The Sixth Commandment is “Honor thy father and mother,” but most Christians read that as respect, not worship.  They reserve worship and absolute obedience for the invisible God.

Confucianism does not have the common Judeo-Christian understanding of an invisible personal God. Rather, Confucius emphasized the ethical framework that automatically led to goodness, perhaps the way a good diet automatically leads to a healthy body.  His idea of the “Mandate of Heaven” was meant to occur naturally as people recognized goodness and naturally surrendered to it.

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The Blind Leading the Blind (or, Life without True Parents)

Detail from “The Blind Leading the Blind” by Sebastian Vrancx.

By Gordon Anderson

Gordon“The blind leading the blind” can be used to describe Western politics and education today. There are, of course, very smart and shrewd politicians or scientists. But, when it comes to knowledge of where we want to go and how to get there, our present culture can be described by this ancient metaphor taught in the Bible, the Upanishads, and Roman classics. As Sextus Empiricus wrote in Outlines of Scepticism: “Nor does the non-expert teach the non-expert — any more than the blind can lead the blind.”

A civilization contains the accumulated experiences of those who have come before, and civilizations continue to adopt new discoveries. However, in the 20th century, the West largely put aside civilizational wisdom, taught by families and religions, and attempted to substitute it with a new-found faith in modern science and the state. The Encyclopedia Britannica exemplified this shift.

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